[gigatexal]

Not necessarily. Those truly in the top 1-5% of their fields will likely have the pick-of-the-litter when it comes to jobs because of word-of-mouth.

Anecdote alert: I joined a small firm in Hamburg, Germany after leaving another startup in the same location. When the new team I had joined was talking about how the company was looking to launch a new product and was in desperate need of a ReactJS dev I showed them something an old friend from the previous job had done and they wanted to offer him the job without even interviewing! The interview that did occur was more or less a formality -- assessing cultural fit and such. He was hired and is happy; I've since moved on but that experience never left me. I kid you not he is one the best ReactJS devs I've ever seen (not that I am in the ecosystem but the things he has built and his knowledge of CSS and JS etc -- he could just a lot done very quickly).